


Lockdown

by rosecat13



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 16:39:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1557086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecat13/pseuds/rosecat13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The floor is cold.</p><p>Tamika Flynn’s heart is cold.</p><p>For @Tamika_Flynn</p><p>-Stay strong, Valians-</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lockdown

Her fingers are raw, nails cracked and bleeding from digging at cement walls. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t make sense to fight. She was Tamika Flynn.

She was Tamika Flynn. She wasn’t the hero of Night Vale.

Sitting there in the cold, dark cell, she thought that she couldn’t even save herself. She thinks of all the soldiers now, being educated, practically re-educated. Their own form of torture. She wishes she could at least be with them.

The manacles around her ankles are heavy and when she sits the wrong way, they dig into her skin. She knows that bloodying herself won’t be enough to lubricate the steel, and even if she could free her feet, how would she run, then? And how would she get past the iron bars of her cell?

She pages back through her mind, trying to find something relevant. Dark eyes scanning the inside of her eyelids, reading nothing. Pads of her toes feeling at the seamless concrete floor.

She wants Carlos. She wants Cecil.

She wants her freedom more, though. Freedom for her army, they didn’t deserve this. They’ve been fighting for so long, they thought that this could work, that they could turn the tide for Night Vale, and the citizens… they just…

It fills her with rage, no, something beyond rage. In her heart something cold and dark burns. It’s not hot like the desert sun, it doesn’t shine in the darkness like a Smiling God, no, her thoughts are dark, as deep as Night Vale sewers. It’s clinging on, digging in with stubborn, arrowhead teeth, she’s made of onyx on the inside. Tamika Flynn with a skeleton of hardened lava glass, and her skin surprisingly paper-thin.

She hates them. She hates them for standing there. For letting this happen, it was just as good as saying “go ahead”, they were complicit in the act. She had taken it, when it had come. No panic had rushed through her. She felt the whir of the helicopter blades, her snarled hair lurching against the wind, and she watched them as they watched her. Book in hand. Dog-eared. Torn in places. It was loved in her grasp and she was not loved in their eyes.

She was no hero. Cecil had tried to tell them that so long ago. He was just a Voice, Tamika was just an icon, there was nothing they could do if no one else was willing to take the first step. Leaders needed followers.

There is no light here. It’s funny, she thinks. She had expected them to flood her with light, to try and scare her shadows away, but instead she was here, sitting in her own silence and festering like an open wound. Her hands ache with papercuts and half-gone nails. The floor was bloody and she had nothing to show for it.

She wanted to be home.

She wanted to be home in the way that all children ache for home. She was a child still. She couldn’t deny it, even though she had tried, time and time again, to be more than her age. She was a leader. She was a killer. Tamika Flynn, child prodigy in the art of strategy, in the art of guerilla warfare. Tamika Flynn with her black eyes, with her strong, stocky build, it was like looking at a brick wall when you saw her. And looking into those dark eyes would be to see your own death.

She tried to hold back her tears. She tried not to think of Carlos and Cecil and their warm bed. Carlos’s humming, Cecil’s sweet kisses. It was too soon for thoughts of home when she was captured, there was still a rebellion to be had, but in that moment she just wanted Mama’s dulce leche. She wanted to be called a sweet little killer.

Tamika slams her fist into the wall and hears her knuckles crack. She doesn’t cry out at the pain, she feels everything slightly move. The small tremors that traveled around her body in the aftershock, the way that the world, just for a moment, had turned to vibrations around her.

She was that punch in the wall. And it makes her try again with her other hand, knowing full-well that she was going nowhere, doing nothing but hurting herself. But she wanted to feel that slight vibration, no, she needed to feel that slight vibration. She wanted to feel them travel down to the Earth’s crust, she wanted her punches to split the planet along new fault lines, she wanted the world to reject Desert Bluffs and swallow it whole, even if that meant taking her with it.

Her hands are so bloody. They’re slick with her own viscera and she cries, tears streaming down her face, snot running from her nose. There is nothing pretty about the way Tamika Flynn cries. She cries like she means it, because there has to be some genuine quality to life.

She won’t smile, not for anyone’s sake. Not for her family’s. Not for the army’s. Not for the town’s. Not for herself. When she sees her army again, and she _will_ see her army again, all they’ll get is a stoic, cold look. There is darkness in their souls. She has to remind them who they are. They are not smiling children. They are children with scars on their skin and in their hearts. They are not victims. They are the soldiers of a town that didn’t know how to protect itself.

Her breath is short and she looks at her hands, the red staining her deep colored skin, just cast in darker colors because of the shade all around. Down the hall, there’s light. Occasional footsteps. A guard. They’re unimportant. She’d kill them in a moment if she could, put her hands around their neck and snap it, run out, clamber out of the facility through the pipes, ventilation, the hallways even, dodging the sticky fingers of Strex Agents, bursting out of the building with her bloodied feet and hands, eyes straining at the bright sun.

In her mind, she runs. She runs and on either side, children gather, freed. They freed themselves; they didn’t need her anymore, but they still follow. And in her mind they run home. To their native sands. To their own nightmares.

The floor is cold.

Tamika Flynn’s heart is cold.

She wipes her nose, and knows her face is streaked in blood. And that suits her just fine.


End file.
